Sublime

“The American Room.”

It’s very easy, under conditions of artificial but continually escalating obligation, to find yourself organizing your life around practices you find ridiculous and possibly indefensible. Women have known this intimately for a long time.

And yet, desire consistently purchased at the price of plausible deniability comes at a cost, both to oneself, and to the nature of the relationships or encounters it generates. Unlike cruising, wherein one acknowledges that one is looking for sex in some form, insisting that one is asking for or seeking nothing reifies the tiresome sexist construc

As I age, the more convinced I am that the concept of “normal” is the most toxic thing in our culture.

Asher is a few months away from turning four, and for the last few years, I have been in the rather tubelike experience of motherhood. I am twenty pounds overweight, and I feel out of place in Los Angeles, in my marriage, in my house, in my own skin. Even though I’m home all the time, I rarely feel at home. I am a person fully in charge of a small

Such objectifying forms of treatment can seemingly serve not only as punishment but also ways of defusing the psychic threat that certain women pose.

I didn’t tell Jonah I was a virgin, just that I hadn’t done it “that much.” I was sure I had already broken my hymen in high school while crawling over a fence in Brooklyn in pursuit of a cat that didn’t want to be rescued.

But the hierarchical nature of gendered social relations within a patriarchal culture can be in a kind of tension with the substantive content of women’s subordination therein. Take some feminine-coded forms of care work in particular. When women are tasked not only with performing certain forms of emotional, social, domestic, sexual, and reproduct